About the Project: Project Rationales
Page Information
Author: John Thompson
Revised: July 22, 2005
Reviewed: Stephen Kelly
What is the Brut?
Project Rationales
Outputs
Resources for
the Scholarly Community
Research Rationale and Questions
The project is guided by the following research questions and problems:
- How can modern scholars estimate the cultural capital enjoyed by the texts and manuscripts belonging to "the English Brut tradition", a phenomenon that manifested itself in these islands in the late medieval and early modern period?
- How was "the English Brut tradition" interpreted and promoted outside England, particularly in border areas where linguistic, literary and historiographical cross fertilization adds an extra dimension to the critical issues surrounding the undoubted attractions of such a potentially divisive reading of British history?
- Can an understanding of the "cultural work" undertaken by the Brut and related historiographical writings be achieved without resorting to the traditional apparatus of philological investigation?
- What would a study of the extant manuscript corpus of the Brut which considered the circulation and use of each manuscript for their reading communities look like?
Among the major problems addressed by the project will be the scale of the surviving manuscript and textual corpus representing "the Brut tradition"; the manner in which this tradition has been virtually ignored by modern scholars working on cultural histories of the English Middle Ages; the current bias of book history towards print culture, at the expense of manuscript culture, and the pressing need to reinvigorate current models of literary and textual production, dissemination and reception.
Among the project's key aims and objectives are:- To recuperate an important Middle English prose work, widely known in its time, and the textual traditions surrounding its history.
- To develop a methodology for mapping the ways in which early book history intersects with ideas of the past in the late medieval and early modern period.
- To examine the role of the Latin and vernacular languages of these islands in fashioning widely differing individual, community and regional monoglot and polyglot identities and loyalties.
- To examine the interrelation between these identities and loyalties and particular ideologies of 'history', 'Englishness', 'belonging' and 'not belonging'.
- To negotiate difficult but strategically important questions regarding our twenty-first century sense of the alterity of the Middle Ages and the supposed existence of a pre-modern/Medieval and early modern/Renaissance set of opposing historical realities (a view that continues to shape, and often distorts, the history of modern English Studies as a discipline).
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